Le Petit Cinéma Club continues with a short animated adaptation of Abel’s Island, one of many iconic illustrated books from the famed children’s author William Steig (Shrek!, Doctor De Soto, Pete’s a Pizza).

Throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, award-winning animator Michael Sporn made a name for himself with carefully drawn, faithful adaptations of popular storybooks such as Quentin Blake’s The Story of the Dancing Frog and Russell Hoban’s The Marzipan Pig. Abel’s Island is one such adaptations; it combines the absurd humor of its source material with Sporn’s precise visual style.

In the film, a dapper mouse (voiced by Tim Curry) gets stranded after a violent rainstorm carries him away while he’s out on a romantic picnic with his wife. Marooned on a small patch of land in the middle of a river, Abel takes up sculpting and befriends a frog while mustering up the courage to swim home and reunite with his beloved.

“We set out to do the artwork for the film more like artwork, rather than animation art.” MICHAEL SPORN

Despite their limited resources, Sporn and his team were determined to capture the loose, expressive vibrancy of Steig’s illustrations. To accomplish this, Sporn and his colleagues first drew their characters on paper and colored them with watercolors and magic markers prior to cutting them out and pasting them on cels. This lends the film its unique, free-flowing quality. As Sporn would remark later in life: “The film was a complicated problem that seemed to resolve itself easily and flow onto the screen without much struggle.”

Michael Sporn was born in Queens, New York, in 1946. He was a self-taught animator who learned the craft from watching Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color and The Woody Woodpecker Show as a kid. He studied at the New York Institute of Technology from 1963-67 and worked with John and Faith Hubley throughout the ‘70s. In 1980, he formed his own production company and made a series of made-for-VHS adaptations of children’s books, earning Academy Award and Emmy nominations in the process. He is remembered for his prodigious work as an animator, as well as his generous spirit as a mentor to his collaborators and readers of his animation blog Splog.

This presentation of Abel’s Island was made possible thanks to First Run Features, a New York distribution company that has championed independent voices since 1979. They also recently launched FRF Video Club, a new online platform that offers a careful selection of titles from their catalog each month.

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer. Special thanks to First Run Features and Animation Obsessive’s careful reporting on Abel’s Island, which is referenced throughout our program notes. An additional note of gratitude to Orfeo Tagiuri for his wonderful animated introduction to this series.